Salon has a nice appreciation of Neil Gaiman. I took a similar journey into Gaiman's work as Laura Miller: American Gods, Coraline, then the Sandman series. If you haven't been convinced by everyone attesting to the fact that you shouldn't be put off by the fact that they're comics, let me be the latest to try: they are one of the most impressive, engrossing pieces of storytelling you are likely to come across in any genre.

If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

What a windbag. And if I may pile on, his opinion of himself is a little high:

What the world needs now: Cheeseburger Fries, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association's attempt to reclaim the #1 Meat crown.

When Advance Food began producing the cheeseburger fries at the beginning of the year under license from the cattlemen's association, the company limited distribution to the central states but the product is now available across the country.

"We think that we will sell about a million dollars' worth this year," Mr. McLaughlin said.

All this, of course, pleases the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. "We want beef in dessert if we can get it there," Ms. Hogan said.

Politeness can be a trap, and Bilquìs was caught in the web of her husband's courtesy. 'As you wish,' she wrote back, and what made her write this was not entirely guilt, but also something untranslatable, a law which obliged her to pretend that Raze's words mean no more than they said. This law is called takallouf. To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words. Takallouf is a member of that opaque, world-wide sect of concepts which refuse to travel across linguisitic frontiers: it refers to a form of tongue-typing formality, a social restraint so extreme as to make it impossible for the victim to express what he or she really means, a species of compulsory irony which insists, for the sake of good form, on being taken literally. When takallouf gets between a husband and a wife, look out.